1. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to communication, and more specifically to techniques for retrieving hypertext packet data content in a wireless communication network.
2. Background
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the primary communication protocol used by web browsers and web applications. A large infrastructure has grown up within the Internet to support efficient operation of the HTTP protocol in the form of Content Delivery Networks. As a result an increasing number of applications are migrating to the HTTP protocol. While there are other reasons for this migration (e.g., Network Address Translation (NAT) and firewall traversal), it is the ability to leverage the massive scalability of the web infrastructure that is the main driver.
Web sites today are often extremely complex, comprising tens or hundreds of objects that must each be separately requested using HTTP. Various optimizations have been defined within HTTP to improve the speed with which the objects can be transported from server to client. A considerable amount of work has been done on application of these optimizations within wired networks; however it remains an unsolved problem to understand how these features behave and combine in the more challenging mobile environments with high Round Trip Time (RTT) and highly variable bandwidth. In particular it should be noted that much HTTP work was carried out some years ago at which time the characteristics of mobile networks differed considerably from today.